Willis, Morgan cop to being funny duo

Thursday

Feb 25, 2010 at 12:01 AMFeb 25, 2010 at 4:18 PM

It’s not too difficult to picture Bruce Willis playing a cop. He’s done it numerous times, as far back as in all of the “Die Hard ” films, and as recently as in last year’s “Surrrogates.” Yet his portrayal of veteran NYPD cop Jimmy Monroe in the new Kevin Smith comedy “Cop Out” isn’t exactly what you’d expect.

Ed Symkus

It’s not too difficult to picture Bruce Willis playing a cop. He’s done it numerous times, as far back as in all of the “Die Hard ” films, and as recently as in last year’s “Surrrogates.”

Yet his portrayal of veteran NYPD cop Jimmy Monroe in the new Kevin Smith comedy “Cop Out” isn’t exactly what you’d expect. Sure, he’s the big-name star of the film, but he steps back a bit, letting Tracy Morgan – as his longtime partner Paul Hodges – bask in the spotlight of playing the loose cannon. Willis is there more for reacting than for acting out.

He knew he had to take on the quiet part in order to let Morgan’s crazy-man role connect with his, and produce both chemistry and comedy.

“Our first day of shooting was interesting,” Willis says of “Cop Out,” which opens Friday. “It was without any pressure, without anyone ever saying, ‘If you guys screw this up, we’re all going home.’ No one said anything like that. Within five minutes of our first scene, our timing, our overlapping dialogue, our pauses – stuff that you learn over years and years of doing comedy – just fell into place so easily that when we were done that day, everyone went, ‘Oh, thank God.’ Because had we not been funny, and not had good timing, it would’ve been a different picture.”

Then again, it actually is a different picture. Yes, it’s a cop buddy movie, and there have been plenty of those before it. And it’s about those two pals joining together to catch the bad guys. In this case, the villains have an extremely valuable baseball card that was owned by Willis’ character, and he needs to get it back to pay for his daughter’s wedding. But the film also has a couple of distinctive things going for it.

“I think ‘Cop Out’ stands by itself as a film that has elements of shoot-’em up in it, that has elements of romance in it, elements of save-the-girl in it, that has two cool tough cops who know how to be cops,” Willis says. “But at a certain point we drew the line and said, you know what, we’re just gonna make this funny. We’re just gonna go for the jokes, and everything else is secondary to that. We just made it about the comedy.”

In a less obvious way, Willis and Morgan, as well as Smith and writing brothers Robb and Mark Cullen, have added a unique element to the genre.

“It’s something to note about all those other films that I see this one being compared to,” Willis says. “Buddy comedies of the ’80s and ’90s, or even ‘In the Heat of the Night.’ Films where there’s a very strong racial tension. You know, black cop, white cop, what’s gonna happen? Not one time in this film did we ever comment that Tracy’s black and I’m white, and I didn’t miss it at all. We just leapt past it.”

Willis came onboard shortly after reading the script, even before Smith was attached.

“It made me laugh out loud,” he said. “And that’s a difficult thing to do on a dry script, first read.”

But he also remembered working with Smith when both acted in “Live Free or Die Hard,” in which Smith played Freddy, the computer whiz. He enjoyed that experience, and he enjoyed being directed by him in “Cop Out.”

“Kevin plays it really loose,” Willis says. “He gave us a lot of latitude. He’s got his own timing and his own very dark sense of humor. He knew when to rein us back in, he knew where we found a joke, and he’d say, ‘That’s it, if you want to improv, improv off of that.’ But with all the improvisation we did, we would then go back and discuss it. We’d say this part worked, this part worked, that part not so much. Then we’d go back and shoot it again.”

Asked if he brought any special acting tools with him for this film, Willis seemed to drift off for a moment, then softly said, “I had a little brother named Ralph Willis. He’s no longer with us. But he was a lot like Tracy. I just thought about him while we were making the film. He was there with me a lot.”